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Comment by peanut_worm | Hacker News Reader

just wondering, what did you use SQLite for on a wedding website?

Similar to other use cases mentioned already, it was a way for us to create a privacy-focused site to manage guests and give guests the opportunity to update their RSVP, dietary needs, and requested song for the DJ. Additionally there were a few sections of the site where my fiancée could update content as she saw fit by logging in and hitting save. We found the database useful to keep track of RSVPs, gifts, and who we still needed to send thank you's to after the event.

The main drawbacks were people who are not comfortable using the web and people remembering their unique adjective-noun passphrase. Also, I'm not very savvy when it comes to CSS or design so my giddiness was crushed demoing what I thought was the MVP to the "project manager".

I don't want to detract this from being about Javalin though. It's fantastic. I would recommend it and use it again for projects.

Re: pass phrases, my go-to for projects like that is to put a unique hash or something in the URL for each different person. The experience for users is that there's no password to remember or anything like that. They're not going to remember the URL anyway.

You can put the hash in a #xxxx part of the URL so it doesn't show up in logs if thats important to you. The downside is you need to give everyone their own URL (maybe via a QR code on a paper invite). But you already had to give everyone a pass-phrase so whatever :)

It's been SOP for some time (at least 20 years) to use an RDBMS to store your site's content and write a stateless application server to pull data from it and compose a response. Call it the "CMS pattern".

Static site generation, and a few other ideas, challenges this basic pattern, but most of the worlds applications use it. Javelin is trying to make the pattern better on several axes, simplicity first-and-foremost, and not replace it.

I truly mean this with love, but this is the most Java comment I've seen in a long time :-D

And (in the Java/enterprise world) is completely correct.

Funny, I had a LAMP stack in mind while writing it, and more specifically WordPress. For all the enterprise Java webapps out there, I bet there are 1000x more php sites. And they all use the same basic cms pattern.

heh, very good point. WordPress is absolutely everywhere and is exactly this model. I think WordPress forged the path too, so definitely deserves the "blame"

I used PostgreSQL for my wedding website. People could RSVP, say how many were coming, volunteer for support roles since we did too much of it ourselves, etc.

It was overkill and I loved it.

For a website, the question should be why not use SQLite.

Given the various compelling and (by now, here, I hope) well-understood advantages, it should be the default choice. Certainly for a site expecting hits in the mid-hundreds, total. Maybe ten simultaneous connections the day of?

Interesting, I interpreted the question completely differently, i.e. why use database at all?

FWIW, I'm not in the web app world, so my wedding website was a single page HTML; not a single page app, let alone a content management system - I googled something like "Wedding page HTML template", then grabbed a HTML template from w3schools, opened it in notepad, and put my own words and IMG tags. It looked pretty, was "responsive" by default, took very little time to create, and worked solidly.

I'm sufficiently old school / ignorant / pragmatic / lazy / focused / something, to wonder why complicate a wedding page with anything else :-)

(I mean, I'm old and ignorant and simple enough that I keep misinterpreting what "static site generator" is :P )

Interesting, I interpreted the question completely differently, i.e. why use database at all?

Maybe the wedding page has forms, needs to store data and author is most familiar with Java or maybe they are getting creative and are calling third party services for convenience, lots of reasons. A simpler solution could be nginx/cgi and a local file for the DB, or cloudfare workers(you can render HTML from them) and their key/value storage.

Yeah that was what I meant but everyone else seems to be commenting except the person I was replying to lol. I am not attacking databases I am just wondering what they used it for on a wedding website.

"Because my website is just pages and doesn't need a database" is a perfectly good reason not to use SQLite, sure.

OP can reply why a database was useful for his wedding site, if he wants; I can think of some reasons why it might be.

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